Thesis advisor: Eyal Dvir / This research studies the effect of exchange rate expectations on A-H share discount in China and Hong Kong. The A-H class listing of Chinese stocks offers an interesting framework to examine asset price in segmented markets. This research wants to contribute to the existing literatures by adding other currencies into the exchange rate model and verify their effect, introducing and controlling for company specific information, such as earnings. I find that the effect of both Euro and US dollar to be significant in explaining the share price disparity, and companies in different sector and with different market capitalization react to currency information differently. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Le travail de ce mémoire apporte une brique fonctionnelle et théorique dans l'élaboration d'un outil informatique générique pour la planification automatisée et optimisée d'une équipe d'employés polyvalents avec une première application dans le domaine de la grande distribution. En pratique, il fournit la formalisation mathématique d'une problématique métier riche où les règles de planification (début, durée, fin, quantité, etc.) à respecter s’appliquent sur différentes granularité temporelle (quart d’heure, plage horaire, horaire journalier, semaine, mois, année). Différentes techniques issues de la Recherche Opérationnelle ont été adaptées et testées tout d’abord pour une version du problème restreint à une semaine, puis pour la version complète à l’année. Ces méthodes correspondent à des heuristiques basées sur la méthode de génération de colonnes où le problème de pricing est résolu par un algorithme dédié de programmation dynamique imbriquée. Les expérimentations ont été réalisées avec des instances issues de cas réels et des instances générées s’inspirant des cas réels comptant jusqu’à une soixantaine d’employés à planifier sur un horizon de planification allant d’une semaine à un an (divisé par périodes de 15 minutes). Les tests réalisés montrent que les méthodes implémentées permettent l’obtention de plannings d'équipe de grande qualité tout en préservant les caractéristiques individuelles de chaque employé (compétences, disponibilité, temps de travail, etc.), le tout utilisable avec un ordinateur de gamme moyenne (simple cœur, moins 4 GB de RAM) avec des temps de calcul raisonnables (quelques secondes à plusieurs heures selon l’instance et méthode). / The thesis provides a practical and theoretical brick for developing a generic software tool for producing automated and optimized schedules of a multi-skill employees team with a first application in retail. We provide a mathematical formulation of a rich staff scheduling problem in which planning rules (start, duration, end, amount, etc.) that must be respected are applied on different time granularity (15 minutes period, timeslot, day-shift, week, month, year). Two variants of the problem with different planning horizons have been considered: the first one with one week and the second one with one year planning horizon. Several methods from Operations Research have been adapted to solve the problem. We propose heuristics based on the column generation approach where the pricing problem is solved using a dedicated nested dynamic programming algorithm. The experiments were performed both on real-life instances and on random instances derived from real cases. Instances have up to sixty employees and a planning horizon from one week to one year (divided by 15 minutes periods). The tests show that the proposed methods are able to find high-quality team schedules while taking into account the individual characteristics of each employee (skills, availability, working time, etc.) and run with a standard PC (single core, less than 4 GB of RAM) with a reasonable computation time (from several seconds to one hour depending on the instance and the used method).

ABSTRACT Six hens responded under an increasing Fixed Ratio schedule of reinforcement to assess demand separately for two different food types: wheat and puffed wheat. Demand curves generated showed the least preferred food, puffed wheat, yielded a higher initial (ln L) demand than the more preferred food, wheat. While responding for the more preferred food, wheat, produced lower initial (ln L) demand functions, responding for wheat was maintained to higher increasing FR schedules of reinforcement than was that for puffed wheat. This phenomenon occurred across all six hens. To assess preference between the two food types the hens responded under a two-link concurrent-chain schedule of reinforcement. Under the concurrent-chain schedule of reinforcement there were three conditions, each consisted of a initial link with VI 90-s VI 90-s in effect, and terminal links of FR1, FR8 and FR32. The concurrent-chain schedule was used to examine if or how preference may relate to demand. Preference measures obtained showed wheat was generally preferred to puffed wheat across all prices throughout the preference assessment. As price increased in the terminal link during the preference assessment, preference for wheat became more extreme as did the hens responding. The results suggest that while there is a systematic relation between preference and demand, in that at higher FR values food with higher demand levels is preferred. This does not seem to hold, however, at FR1

<p>The thesis presents annual price series for rye and barley in Östergötland during the period 1592-1735. Prices of wheat, oats, animal products, building materials, iron, nails, horse shoes and horse shoe nails from about the mid-17th century up to 1735 are also presented and analysed. New data has been excerpted from four hospitals and about fifty parishes in Östergötland. Prices from other provinces have also been excerpted for the study. This nes data is compared to already published prices from Sweden´s capital and from several provinces in central parts of the western national region of Sweden of that time. This area constituted Sweden´s core region. By linking the studies results to previous research, a description is made of the price developments for rye, butter and tallow up to 1775, that is, during Sweden´s period of great power and age of freedom. A principal result for the roughly 150 years primarily covered by the thesis is that it was chiefly the prices of rye and barley, the most important food at the time, that fluctuated in twelve cycles. Periodically there were large fluctuatons. The price cycles for corn (half rye, half barley) had an average amplitude of somewhat more than 100 % and a duration of 11 years on average. The prices were on average higher further north in the country. The causes of the price fluctuations are complex. During the major part of the period studied, Sweden was at war or in armistice period, which occupied a large part of the male population. Politically, increasingly great power was gradually concentrated to the king and autocracy was introduced, culminating at the end of Charles XII´s regency. The peasantry was burdened by high taxes and other onuses. After the middle of the 17th century the country was no longer self-subsistent but largely dependent on corn import. The production of foddstuffs decreased, partly through a smaller part of the country´s resources beeing used for production, and partly due to bad harvests. Recurrent epidemics reduced the population even up to the early 18th century.</p>

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the way people buy and sell. The internet is characterized by increased access to information. This increased information should foster convergence to the “law of one price,” for homogenous goods. The surge of electronic markets has motivated a stream of research focusing on comparing the efficiency of the internet market to the traditional one. This dissertation contributes to the existing literature of consumer search behavior in electronic markets and its effects on the price level and dispersion in the market more generally. A part of this dissertation assesses the direct and indirect effect of increased internet usage on the prices of airline tickets, using a unique contemporaneous online and offline transaction data for airline tickets, covering the final quarter of 2004. The study also investigates the relationship between increased internet usage and price dispersion in the market for airline tickets. This study also includes an exhaustive set of controls for airline ticket characteristics, namely refundability, advance purchase requirements, travel and stay restrictions, class of travel, departure and return day of the week and time, flight level load factor along with other market structure data used in the standard airlines literature. The existing theoretical literature in consumer search extended to the electronic markets assumes, for simplicity, that all consumers in the internet markets are the “searchers,” looking for the lowest price. The internet, however, also plays the role of a convenient shopping medium for a group of consumers whose primary motivation is not to search for the lowest price. The contemporary literature incorrectly categorizes these consumers as the traditional searchers. The remaining part of this dissertation provides a modification to the existing theoretical models of consumer search to accommodate both searchers and non-searchers in each of the electronic and traditional markets and derive the implications of the increased internet usage on the average level of prices and price dispersion in a market selling a homogenous good.

The thesis presents annual price series for rye and barley in Östergötland during the period 1592-1735. Prices of wheat, oats, animal products, building materials, iron, nails, horse shoes and horse shoe nails from about the mid-17th century up to 1735 are also presented and analysed. New data has been excerpted from four hospitals and about fifty parishes in Östergötland. Prices from other provinces have also been excerpted for the study. This nes data is compared to already published prices from Sweden´s capital and from several provinces in central parts of the western national region of Sweden of that time. This area constituted Sweden´s core region. By linking the studies results to previous research, a description is made of the price developments for rye, butter and tallow up to 1775, that is, during Sweden´s period of great power and age of freedom. A principal result for the roughly 150 years primarily covered by the thesis is that it was chiefly the prices of rye and barley, the most important food at the time, that fluctuated in twelve cycles. Periodically there were large fluctuatons. The price cycles for corn (half rye, half barley) had an average amplitude of somewhat more than 100 % and a duration of 11 years on average. The prices were on average higher further north in the country. The causes of the price fluctuations are complex. During the major part of the period studied, Sweden was at war or in armistice period, which occupied a large part of the male population. Politically, increasingly great power was gradually concentrated to the king and autocracy was introduced, culminating at the end of Charles XII´s regency. The peasantry was burdened by high taxes and other onuses. After the middle of the 17th century the country was no longer self-subsistent but largely dependent on corn import. The production of foddstuffs decreased, partly through a smaller part of the country´s resources beeing used for production, and partly due to bad harvests. Recurrent epidemics reduced the population even up to the early 18th century.

The internship company does not have a standard procedure for preparing an engineer’s estimate of probable construction cost document (engineer’s estimate) for municipal projects. Every project manager employs a methodology that is a slightly different variation of the historical data approach. The internship objective was to develop a construction unit price estimation model that provides more accurate results than the company’s existing unit price estimation methodology for the City of Fort Worth construction projects. To accomplish the internship objective several tasks were conducted, including; gathering City of Fort Worth construction projects bid tabulation data (including all bids) for the past three years; developing three construction item unit price databases using the data collected; conducting statistical analyses using the unit price databases;developing tables and graphs showing the construction cost items and their appropriate estimated unit prices to be used by the project managers in their cost estimates; developing an approach to apply construction unit costs which adjusts for unique project characteristics; developing guidelines for using the developed tables and graphs to estimate unit prices for municipal projects; using one recent project to compare the company’s existing unit price estimation methodology and the new developed model with actual unit bid prices; and developing guidelines for updating the unit price database, tables, and graphs. The study made use of both normal and log-normal distributions to model the unit bid price data collected from the City of Fort Worth. The factors that are perceived to influence a contractor’s unit bid price for a given item were identified and given a degree of impact on the project by the project managers. The factor that had the highest impact on the unit bid prices was discovered to be item quantity. The unit price estimating methodology presented in this study generated a better fit than the internship company’s original method for predicting the actual average unit bid prices for the one case study the methodology was applied.

Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between the cities’ GDP and prices. We would like to find out the differences between China Telecom’s broadband prices and areas. If there are differences, are those differences considered from the cities’ GDP? The outcome of this dissertation will provide information about new project price of China Telecom after Network three in one. Design/methodology/approach: The study deals with the relationship between China Telecom Company telecommunication prices and areas. This refers to the use of China Telecom Company’s broadband prices and the information from three different areas. The hypotheses are tested with survey data from three different areas in China. Findings: The results show that the cities’ GDP and the price of China Telecom service are related. Originality/value: This thesis will explore the influencing factors the price in telecommunication industry.

Purpose/ aim: The aim is to examine if IKEA expand too fast. We try to find answers to this problem. This is a huge problem to IKEA and other large-scale companies which plan to expand in the world. Design/methodology/approach: Data on customers’ feelings has been collected through questionnaires. The analysis includes a description of the sample and statistic test. After the test, the relationship between price and quality will be found. Findings: The analysis showed that the expansion of IKEA is fast enough to affect the quality of the products. There is a positive relationship between the quality and price. The rule is that the higher the price the better the quality. The data collected from the questionnaires shows that people think that the quality of IKEA’s products has decreased. In the analysis, the details are showed. What happened, and why did it  happen? From this we suggest that IKEA should slow down the steps to expansion and pay more attention to the quality of the products. Originality/ value: The topic about IKEA’s expansion is a totally new area, which hasn’t been researched upon before. Most people think IKEA is a miracle and they always hope IKEA will build more stores in the world, but with this we disagree. Based on these findings we would argue that IKEA should slow down the steps to expansion and pay more attention to the quality of the products. This study has value for all the large-scale companies that want to find a way to analyze if a company expands too fast.